In many manufacturing and construction activities it is frequently necessary to remove a protrusion of material from a component or from a substrate surface. Examples of such removal operations include clipping the head off a bolt and the removal of a bolt head, a nut, a rivet, a weld bead, or a temporary assembly alignment tab from a substrate surface of assembled components. These operations may be required during normal assembly, during demolition of equipment or facilities, or during product repair or manufacturing rework activities. Various tools such as bolt cutters, chisels, drills, grinders, and acetylene torches are sometimes used for removal of a protrusion of material from a substrate surface. The application of power tools often results in one or more undesirable process characteristics, such as damaging the substrate surface due to excessive temperature or physical marring, or failing to remove all of the protrusion of material due to a mismatch between the cutting edge of the removal tool and the substrate surface. In addition, many power tools require more time to effect the removal of a protrusion than is economically desirable. Manually-powered tools not only suffer from some of the same undesirable characteristics of powered tools, they also are generally limited to removal of small quantities of small protrusions because of the physical strength and endurance limits of an operator. What are needed therefore are improved tools for economically, quickly and easily removing a protrusion of material from a component or from a substrate surface.